Thanks to the growth of the state over time, political stakes have become much higher, and groups fear that they will be crushed by the other side if they lose. Crisis-induced cohesion is not a silver bullet, but rather a ticking time bomb.
Chile, like many other countries, needs to do this: cut taxes, deregulate, and limit spending.
The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. While they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent.
The whole idea of government regulating so-called monopolies in order to promote competition is based on fallacies. If anything, such intervention only stifles market competition and lowers living standards.
With apologies to Frédéric Bastiat, this is how his great essay "The Seen and the Unseen" might read if applied to the current government-forced lockdowns forcing business owners into bankruptcy across America and the world.
New York and New Jersey have produced more COVID-19 deaths than the rest of the country combined. So politicians have repeatedly claimed that the nation is "two weeks behind New York" to drum up support for extreme lockdown measures.
We need to move beyond the stale platitudes of trying to fix politics in DC. The chattering class’s lamentation about the divisiveness of politics is frankly silly. In some ways, polarization is our friend.
See what we've accomplished in the first quarter of 2020.
By protecting banks from the costs of poor investment decisions, central banks encourage further risk taking and malinvestment. They also prevent liquidation, which brings failed businesses' assets to the market at bargain prices, allowing new businesses to emerge from the detritus.
It is fundamentally wrong to put the entire economy at the service of a single goal and to commit to a single solution. Human action always involves weighing up different goals and different means.
